Archive for the ‘gamification’ Category

I spent the early part of last week in Vienna attending and speaking at the Gamification in HR Summit. My slide deck can be found on slideshare. It was an interesting experience for the two days that I spent at Vienna, meeting gamification experts from multiple organizations.

The theme seemed to be strangely similar – each one spent their initial time within their organization fighting against odds to convince their Management to invest in the concept of gamification. Their journey and struggles in the process struck a common chord with all participants. Hopefully, going forward, gamification will have a better say in every organization.

While the implementation changed from strategic games to specific solutions for groups, Gamification is here to stay. The gamification initiatives can be divided into three categories:

External-focused – Initiatives for end-customers e.g. loyalty awards, customer support sites like that of Best Buy.

Internal-strategic – Initiatives like the one presented by Maarten Molenaar of Rabobank.

Internal-specific – Initiatives like the one presented by Guido Helmerhorst for KLM’s Onboarding process and Anthony Scarpino of Sodexo. The key message here was that Gamification was not about ‘gamification’.

The talks and conversations during the presentation were impressive given the stature of the speakers, providing all of us enough ammunition for new ideas. I am looking forward to the next year’s summit already!

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It is the time of year again to look into the crystal-ball for technologies. In hindsight, some of the 2012 predictions mentioned came true – hopefully my track record will be better this year !

Let us look at the five technologies that will gain mainstream in 2013 then

BYOD – “Bring Your Own Device” will gain traction in the market, leading to organizations figure out how they want to integrate their existing Support activities with the new consumer devices that their employees use. Hence, Mobile Device/Application Management will be the focus for many organizations.

Social Networking moves into enterprise – Yes, Social Networking will get into mainstream adoption within the enterprise. Once again, organizations will realize that there is no value in restricting/prohibiting/banning social media within the enterprise and instead look at ways to allow social media in a controlled manner in the enterprise.

Apple will see their sales impacted (mostly by the absence of Steve Jobs at the helm) and Microsoft leading other vendors to grab a share off from the Mac. Android will get a big push this year and slowly come closer to the Apple ecosystem.

Mobile Payment is poised for a big explosion in the enterprise. Organizations will have to incorporate this with their traditional offerings so that they can use the proliferation of mobiles.

Gamification will increase within the enterprise and organizations will use it to counter all the “soft aspects” that they face within.

Do you agree? Have I missed any key technology that will gain ground next year? Let me know.

Gamification is applicable not only in games like Farmville but also within enterprises. Best Buy, Tesco are planning to introduce the elements of gamification on their site where their frequent customers earn points and gain levels. You must be aware of this example – StackOverflow is another site which has all gamification elements that has made it successful. Analysts like Gartner are predicting that by 2014, 70% of the 2000 largest global companies will use gamification for at least one aspect of their organization.

Do watch out for this phenomenon in your eco-system very soon. Look at the books for more reading material. Some of the vendors who have platforms that enable enterprises include Bunchball, Badgeville, BigDoor, TierX. Others like Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP are including gamification within their products.

Some of the gamified courses online include

http://livemocha.com/

http://www.busuu.com/

http://www.memrise.com/

http://duolingo.com/

Coursera, the online site that offers courses from reputed universities for free, has offered the first-ever gamification course. 9000 students stayed through the 8-week course to finish the assignments and quizzes – a definite indication of the growing interest.